Light Up The Sky
by MntT77
Summary: What happens when the perpetually optimistic Starfire loses everything? After all, all it takes is one bad day...
1. Disclaimer

Two disclaimers to make before the story starts:

Disclaimer #1: While this story is _largely_ based on the 2003 TV series version of the Teen Titans, certain elements have also been borrowed from the past comics and also from more recent incarnations such as the made-for-TV animated movies, but definitely NOT anything from Teen Titans Go! In simple terms, don't be surprised if details that aren't canon in the regular show come up.

Disclaimer #2: This story is very violent and very gory and will also cover some very dark themes indeed. _**It is definitely not a story for young children.**_

For those who wish to keep reading, I hope you enjoy the story!


	2. Chapter 1

**Light Up The Sky – Chapter 1**

The previous six months had been particularly gruelling for Starfire. The cause of this grief stemmed from a megalomaniacal cult led by none other than Brother Blood, who had managed to reconstruct his shattered body and once again rise to power. Unlike before, where he had used his 'schools' to gain power, this time he had managed to cement his status across the globe via exploiting the world of politics, under the alias Bernard Winters.

After many years of economic turmoil, Winters' promises of hazing the 'Old America' to the ground and starting afresh with a firmer grasp of the Founding Fathers' values quickly got the public on his side, and his great wealth and powers of mind control gained him many powerful allies in the political circuit. Within just two years he had managed to campaign to be president of the United States, under his own political party called 'The New People's Party'. As though they were drugged into submission, he single-handedly turned the two-party system on its head by getting the public to overwhelmingly vote him in to be the new president.

With all the power of the United States' military arsenal at his disposal, this was when the Titans' trouble truly began.

All at once, Bernard Winters revealed to the US citizens his true identity of Brother Blood and gave them a simple choice – they could comply, or they would die. By this point he had managed to possess everyone in the military and every other politician, who were all too eager to carry out his orders, often in extremely unsavoury ways. He had even taken control of units like the Suicide Squad and mercenaries such as Deathstroke, giving him access to any type of killing he required.

The Titans and Titans East were some of the few people who were both mentally capable of resisting him (thanks largely to coaching on Cyborg's part), whilst also being powerful enough to defy him without being instantly subdued and eliminated. Taking him down seemed like an impossible mission, but after the incident with Trigon they had already seen the end of the world once, and they certainly had no intention of seeing it again.

Their complicated plan saw the Titans having to split up and be apart from each other for months on end, with Starfire being assigned a particularly arduous mission. As she was the only Titan who was able to survive the cruel conditions of deep space without equipment, she was tasked with the goal of taking down as many military satellites as possible, but to do so in a way which aroused as little suspicion as possible.

Destroying satellites was easy, but making their destruction look accidental was considerably less so, and she had to time these missions carefully. But after months of painstaking work, she had finally destroyed every satellite. Just as the final one had exploded, her communicator buzzed. The video screen was so garbled that she could not make out any imagery, but she faintly heard Robin's voice commanding, in slightly scratchy tones:

"Return to Titans Tower. Now. Repeat. Return to Titans Tower as soon as you can!"

Starfire strongly suspected that this was a trap but was fearful of the chance that her friends might genuinely be in danger and need her help, so flew back to Earth post-haste.

When she returned, she was dismayed to see that the Tower was in complete ruins. Panicked, she immediately entered through a broken window, and the sight that befell her at that moment was far worse than one her imagination could ever have hoped to conjure.

In the living room she found three bodies hideously mangled and mutilated, surrounded by a rotting stench so disgusting that Starfire ended up vomiting onto the floor. Thereafter ignoring her intense nausea, she frantically run towards the body closest to her, which was Raven's. Both of Raven's arms had been broken in several places, and bent at horrific angles, while her legs had bits of bone jutting out around both her thigh and her tibia. Her cloak was soaked in blood, and on her chest there were several wounds that looked as though someone had stabbed at her repeatedly with a jagged knife. The expression on her face was of a pain unspoken right to the bitter end.

Starfire simply stared for a full minute, unable to take in the utterly catastrophic fate which had befallen one of her closest friends. As someone who prided herself on managing her emotions, in this moment she was unable even to cry from sheer shock.

A small piece of the broken ceiling fell onto Starfire's head, which jolted her from her stupor. It was at this point that her eyes came across Cyborg, who had met an equally terrible end. He had been decapitated, and then the head sliced into nine parts which oozed blood and brain matter all over the carpet. One arm was lying next to his chopped-up head, while the other was lying several feet away, over in the kitchen area, and his legs were nowhere to be seen. His torso had several very large dents on it, as though it had been smashed in with a baseball bat, and a fractured motherboard peeked out from around his chest area.

"Who… who could…"

A large amount of rubble came down from the ceiling this time and landed directly on top of her. It was painful, but Starfire found herself almost grateful for the split-second distraction from the nightmare that had become her life. As she emerged from the wreckage she came across the third body, the one that had belonged to her former love interest Robin. His body was perhaps the most grotesquely injured of all. His face had been stripped entirely of skin, and the muscles underneath sliced in every direction. Chunks of skin had also been ripped from various other parts of his body haphazardly, and all of his limbs were covered in bruises and fractures. His entire midsection had been split open, and his insides trailed several metres outwards.

How long they had been dead was uncertain, but what was certain was that the deaths they had suffered had been excruciatingly painful. Just as Starfire was reaching the capacity to cry, another horrifying thought came into her head.

"But where is Beast Boy? What happened to him?"

As if in answer, she heard a faint, croaky scream. "Starrrrrrfiiiiiiire…."

She froze. "Who… who said that?!"

"Starrrrfiiiiiire…."

The voice seemed to be coming from ground level, near the kitchen counter. She gingerly walked over to the counter and spotted something green on the ground next to it. When she looked more closely, she quickly wished that it was something she had never seen – it was Beast Boy, in mouse form, except that the lower half of his body had been completely obliterated, the entrails of which still surrounded him. He was shivering constantly.

"Beast Boy. Who did this to you?"

"I…. don't know. It happened so fast, I…." There were two seconds of silence between them, an agonisingly long two seconds. "They're all dead, Star"

A tear fell from Starfire's eye. "I know." There was another agonising pause. "What happens now?"

"Well, I know one last thing I want you to do for me"

"Yes, Beast Boy. Anything!" Starfire was desperate to ease her one remaining fellow Titan's suffering.

"Kill me"

Starfire could not believe what she had heard. "Surely you don't mean –"

"Please, Starfire. I want you to kill me!"

"No! I would never kill anyone, especially not one of my best friends. Not the only one I have left!"

"Starfire, I'm dead meat anyway. It won't be long until I lose consciousness and die from blood loss. Part of my brain got damaged in the attack which means I can't change back into human form anymore, and so now I'm stuck like this, in agony. All you'll be doing is making it so that I don't have to suffer for as long as I otherwise would have"

Starfire, despite all that she had just seen, still had a faint glimmer of resilience in her eyes. "Absolutely not! You can and you will survive, I will make sure of it!"

"It's too late, Starfire, it's far too late. Even if I did survive, what's left to live for anyway? Please… let me die…"

Starfire could scarcely stand upright. "Alright. I will do it. If there is only one way to help my friend in his last moments, then I will do it"

"Thanks, Star. Hey, how about one last joke before I kick the bucket, eh?"

Starfire marvelled at how Beast Boy still managed to keep hold of his humorous streak. "OK"

"What's white and lives in the tropical rainforest?"

"I do not know"

"A very confused polar bear!"

Beast Boy chuckled feebly, then fell into a coughing fit. Starfire, standing up straight by this time and with a face filled with remorse, pointed her hands, which were now glowing with green energy, towards him. "Goodbye, Beast Boy"

She aimed the concentrated starbolt beam directly onto him for three seconds. By the time she was finished, his body had been reduced to ash.

At a complete loss regarding what to do next, Starfire decided to retreat into her room. She could not bear the thought of looking at her friends' corpses any longer, and her head was still reeling from the fact that one of their lives had ended by her own hand. But when she entered her abode, what she saw made her scream – the nightmare was far from over.

It was not the fact that her bedspread had been ripped up, or that her windows were broken, or that the wallpaper had been slashed and torn. Five separate hooks had been secured to her ceiling, and from those hooks all five of the Titans East hung on nooses, evidently having been there for quite some time. Upon closer inspection Starfire became even more disgusted when she saw that the nooses were not made of rope, as per usual, but instead had been crafted from the victims' own intestines.

All at once, the atrocity of everything she had seen in those last few minutes, and particularly beings forced to kill one of her own friends, took over Starfire's mind and she flew into a rage unlike any she had ever felt before.

"What kind of sick, disgusting, demented thing could do something like this?! Who could ever _consider_ it?!"

Completely out of control by this stage, Starfire released all the ultraviolet energy that had been stored inside her at once. The green explosive wave expanded outwards, encompassing all of Titans' Tower. Too enraged and aggrieved to fly, Starfire plummeted to the ground. As she rose, she looked around her and saw that her friends' bodies had been reduced to ash via the explosive wave. An overwhelming guilt overtook her – their lives had been expunged, and now there were no bodies left to mourn either. It started to rain heavily, and as her body became soaked, she cried amongst the wreckage that surrounded her, and it would be several hours before she would finally rise with a strengthened resolve, with only one thing left on her mind – revenge.


End file.
